Class and colour in South Africa

Class struggle
The class struggle in a fully-developed capitalist society is a struggle between the ruling class, which owns the means of production, and the working class, which operates the means of production and is exploited by the ruling class. Such a struggle can be observed in full swing in countries like Britain and America. But in societies which are slightly less fully developed, the capitalist class has to fight not only against the working class, but against the previous ruling class—that is the class which derived its power from the ownership of land, and which formed the master class before the progress of large-scale industry threw up another class to challenge it. Nineteenth-century Britain witnessed the strife between the old landed upper class and the rising industrial upper class, culminating in the victory of the latter in the passing of the Reform Bill in 1832 and the Repeal of the Corn Laws 14 years later.

The situation in South Africa at the present time is in some ways not dissimilar to the situation in this country 130 years ago. There is a class which draws its wealth from the ownership of land; and there is a class which draws its wealth from the ownership of industry. There are, in fact, two kinds of society in South Africa: the old agricultural society, and the new industrial society. South African politics reflect the economic and social struggle between the old form of society and the new.

Dutch South Africa
The farming community of South Africa is very largely composed of Afrikaners—descendants of Dutch, Flemish. German Protestant and French Huguenot immigrants. These Afrikaner farmers own the land and employ Negro labourers. The landowners are and always have been determined that the Bantu shall form merely a floating population, with no stake in the land. The Bantu farm-workers have very little money; the white farmer pays the greater part of his labourers’ meagre wages in kind, in the form of huts to sleep and eat in, rough grazing for their few head of cattle, and seed for their garden plots. This form of society has existed, and from the point of view of the ruling and owning class has prospered, almost since the first settlers were put ashore, by the Dutch in the 17th century, to hold the Cape as a valuable halfway house for the ships trading to the East.

British South Africa
The Dutch took possession of the Cape as a landfall on the way to India; and the British stole (or, to use a more polite word, captured) it from them in 1806 for the same reason. As the century wore on, and the Dutch quarrelled with their new masters, the more independent spirits among the settlers trekked north, to Natal, then across the Orange River, and finally across the Vaal River. But British settlers followed them, attracted by the lure of diamonds and of gold. The apostle of this industrial expansion was Cecil Rhodes, at once Prime Minister of the Cape and Managing Director of the British South Africa Company; its centres of operation were Kimberley and the Witwatersrand, and its outlets Cape Town and the ports of Natal. A number of armed clashes between the British and the Boers culminated at the turn of the century in the Boer War, which, at length, the British won, by means of destroying the farmsteads of their enemies and transporting their families into concentration camps, where many of the Boer children died. It may be doubted whether at that time the strength of the new capitalist class was sufficient by itself to overcome the class which drew its strength from the land; but the ultimate issue was put beyond dispute by outside intervention. The farming-landowning class had been cut off from its former fatherlands in Europe; while the Capitalist class could count on the help of imperialist Britain, then the greatest industrial power in the world

This is the background of the South African scene. But the Boer War did not settle the matter. There was, and still is, much vitality left in the Afrikaner farming class. It still carries on its resistance to the industrial capitalist class; but in the long run one of them must go down before the other.

Black South Africa
The hostility between these two classes can be seen clearly in their respective attitudes to that majority of the South African population—the Negroes—who form the bulk of the working-class, alike on the farm owned by the Afrikaner and in the mine or factory owned by the Britisher. Each of them regards this class as subordinate. But while the Afrikaner’s self-interest drives him to adopt a harsh and oppressive policy, the Britisher, also motivated by self-interest, tends ip take a more “liberal” point of view.

To the Afrikaner the Negro has two possible capacities. He is, first and foremost, a rival for the ownership of the land. There were in 1946 over 8,000,000 Negroes in the Union, against 2,300,000 whites, nearly 1,000,000 Cape Coloured (of mixed white and black ancestry) and 200,000 Asiatics (nearly all of them Indians). Most of the Negroes are the descendants of the Zulu-Xhosa peoples, who came into the country from the North while the whites came in from overseas—the whites having exterminated or driven out the original black inhabitants of the area. These white and black invaders naturally found themselves in competition for the possession of the land. It has always been the policy of the Afrikaner landed interest to confine Negro ownership of land to certain fixed “Native” reserves: the Bantu can emerge from these reserves only as landless labourers on the white-owned farms, and must never be allowed to take root in the great areas of South Africa which are kept exclusively for white ownership. This restriction of Negro ownership always applied in the Afrikaner territories of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State; and the granting of Dominion status to South Africa in 1909 by Asquith’s Liberal Government’ enabled the Afrikaners (who were the numerical majority of the white population) to impose the same rule throughout South Africa. Since 1913, Negroes have been able to own land only in certain carefully limited areas of the Union. At the present time, more than three-quarters of the total population of South Africa can own land in only one-tenth of its territory. This fragment of South Africa set aside for Negro ownership consists largely of less favoured land in remote districts, such as the Transkei Reserve in eastern Cape Province. At the beginning of this year there was only one important urban area throughout South Africa where Negroes could own land : and that was in a suburb of Johannesburg called Sophiatown.

Anomaly
The Nationalist Government has now put a stop to this anomalous situation. It has built a new settlement of corrugated-iron-roofed one-storey-huts at Meadowlands, eleven miles outside Johannesburg, and has forcibly begun to evict the Africans of Sophiatown from their freeholds and to carry them and their goods to Meadowlands. There the Negroes will be allowed to become tenants of the land; but they will not be allowed to to own it. The Africans have no say in the matter. The Government says they must go, fixes the exact days, and provides transport and police. This operation is being carried out under the Native Resettlement Act, passed by a Parliament elected almost exclusively by the whites. The Nationalists claim that the removal to Meadowlands is aimed solely at improving Native housing; but there are other African locations around Johannesburg where the housing conditions are worse than at Sophiatown; and, what is more, the shacks of Sophiatown are being destroyed and the area reserved for white occupation— this in a city which is short of 50,000 houses for its black population (Daily Telegraph, 10/2/55). The real aim is clearly to destroy the African’s ability to own land in one of the few urban areas where he still had that right.

Apartheid
The Afrikaner, then, sees the Negro as a competitor for the ownership of the land; and is led thereby to support apartheid, the policy of confining each of the ethnic groups in South Africa to its own areas—with the unspoken corollary that the areas reserved for the white minority shall be much larger than the areas reserved for the coloured majority. But to the Afrikaner the Bantu is not only a competitor for the land: he is also a farm-labourer. If apartheid were carried out in full, as is advocated by the extreme wing of the Nationalists, who would do the work? The extremists, those who embrace apartheid in all its pristine purity, say that the Boers must return to the ways of their ancestors, and themselves work their farms with their own hands and those of their families. But the majority of the Afrikaners are no more prepared to give up the surplus value—that is, the profits —which they make out of their African labourers, than they are to abandon their ownership of the land to the Africans. “On the farms you hear sad tales of how difficult it is to keep Africans, even with the help of legislation, from drifting away to make rather more money in urban employment. No one at these managerial levels suggests that his workers—-or he—would be better off if there were a trek back to the Reserves. On the contrary the cry is for more cheap labour.” (The Times. 14/1 /55: succeeding references are also to The Times). The Nationalists, then, are in a dilemma. They have swept triumphantly into power on the cry of apartheid: they captured 86 of the 156 seats in the South African Parliament in 1948, and in 1953 they increased their members to 94. But even their own supporters would not tolerate them if they ever seriously tried to put apartheid into effect.

Big business
The Nationalists must also, when they are considering apartheid measures, reflect upon the opposition they would arouse among the English-speaking element in the Union. Although this element is now split among the United Party, the Federal Party, and the Liberal Party, it remains very powerful; for it contains within its ranks the owners of the country’s industries. The Times correspondent, coming from a country where the Capitalist class and the ruling class are merely two names for one body of people, finds this distinctly odd. “The situation is a somewhat curious one in which a Government and those who have voted it to power play relatively little part in the conduct of big business. . . . It remains true to say that the bulk of the business in the Union, especially at its directorial and managerial levels, is carried on by men of British stock or by other non-Afrikaner immigrants. The Afrikaner now governs: the minority makes the money in the towns.” (14/1/55). Curious or not, it is the fact; and the Capitalist class gains in economic power with every year that passes. “By 1939 South Africa was well advanced along a course from which, so far as can be seen, there is no turning back and which was transforming her from a land of primary producers and gold and diamond miners into a complex society in which secondary industries were looming more and more large. The process was accelerated by the war-time hold-up leading to demand for consumer and capital goods. Major industries were established or extended.” (11/1/55). Industrial expansion means larger towns and more workers in the factories. If we take four of the largest cities in the Union, Johannesburg, Cape Town. Durban, and Port Elizabeth, we find that between 1936 and 1946 the white population rose by 29%; the Cape Coloured population by 34%; the Asiatic population by 38%, and the Negro population by 71%. Recently Mr. Hepple, a South African M.P., speaking in Parliament, said that in 1936 there were only 175.000 Negroes in industry; now there are 500,000—nearly three times as many (9/2/55).

(To be continued)

JOSHUA